THE STATE OF POETRY
JEFFREY DONALDSON
Must Men Stand By What They Write?
The discernment of a writer's moral liability for those literary artifacts he
applies himself to, and a reticent and ironic engagement of such responsi–
bility in his poetry, are characteristic features of Geoffrey Hill's de–
manding oeuvre. Under the burden of what he variously calls the poet's
"empirical guilt," "the tongue's atrocities," "the indecencies of the lan–
guage" and "its great potential for violence," which subsist as
"irredeemable error in the very substance and texture of his craft and
pride," the writer discovers his vocation, that of bearing his "peculiar ...
shame in a world growing ever more shameless." In this respect , the jolt–
ing line near the end of his recent poem , "The Mystery of the Charity of
Charles Peguy," "Take that for your example!" not only serves a smart
cuff to the reader's car, but suggests what has been most characteristic of
Hill's own try at a vocation: the remembrance and circumspection of
certain historical figures whose exemplary lives both anticipate and re–
prove our own inadequate efforts, framing the "extent" of their efficacy.
In this recent poem, the death of Charles Peguy, French poet and
socialist, on the battlefield of the Marne in the autumn of 1914 is pre–
sented as a symbolic gesture of radical expiation for what were feared
to
be the fateful consequences of a published article (in which, as the poem
ha it, Peguy writes, "Let us have drums to beat down his great voice"),
which mayor may not have incited a man to murder the French activist
Jean Jaures. The poem, both "eloge and elegy" (that is, both an
appreciation and lament), finds meaning with respect to its own expia–
tory responsibilities by mirroring Peguy's fall. Hill, however, uses a glass
with this difference: it reflects
upon
and partly determines what it mirrors.
Such reflections frame certain questions concerning the situation of
poetry. Hill quotes in an essay Wallace Stevens's adage that "after one
has abandoned a belief in god [sic], poetry is that essence which takes its
place as life's redemption." Here too he addresses the problem of poetry's
surrogate status, while at the same time raising doubts as to precisely
what "place" poetry takes.
"The Mystery of the Charity of Charles Peguy" is an artful pattern–
ing and lamentation of Peguy's death. At the same time it presents
